My API story: Building an API platform

Danielle Royston, acting CEO of Totogi and Public Cloud Evangelist at TelcoDR, shares why she believes an API-first cloud-native platform and TM Forum Open APIs give CSPs much needed business agility. Tell us about yourself and your job I wear a couple of different hats these days. As TelcoDR and a public cloud evangelist,

I'm helping to educate and drive change in our industry around the opportunity the public cloud presents to telcos. As acting CEO of Totogi, I lead an advanced telco software company that build products exclusively for the public cloud. In both roles, I lean on my 25+ years of enterprise software experience.

Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?

Open platforms and APIs (along with the public cloud) are the way to break out of the telco industry’s monolithic, on premise, proprietary approach. The program and associated member projects facilitate interoperability across a heterogeneous ecosystem and trigger a mind shift towards open, extensible, and API-based platforms. We fundamentally believe that operators need to stop customizing proprietary applications, because it leads to huge inefficiencies in the business. There is a clear trend towards public cloud, API-based services that are open and transparent. Totogi API platform is geared to help CSPs achieve business agility using our API-first cloud-native platform and TM Forum Open APIs.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?

To be frank, ALL OF THEM. Totogi API platform is built with the mission to give CSPs equal access to all that the public cloud has to offer through TM Forum’s Open APIs. Totogi API platform is implementing TM Forum’s Open APIs to enable CSPs to build apps that support endless use cases (only limited by their imagination). Totogi believes CSPs should be empowered to build applications on their own – quickly. We’re building low code solutions to complement our offering to really speed up application timelines and lower the learning curve for programming with the public cloud and the Open APIs. To test our approach, we developed some quick-win, functional extensions of a customer care application through the Totogi API platform, using a mix of Customer Management, Communication Management, Usage Management and Trouble Ticket Open APIs.

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

We wanted to highlight an example that seems fairly simple to mobile end users but is noticeably absent from customer service portals. Using the Customer Management, Communication Management, Usage Management and Trouble Ticket Open APIs – with a little bit of AWS public cloud sprinkled in – we built, deployed and launched a cloud service in 30 minutes, demonstrating how to quickly increase customer engagement and improve customer experience with face-to-face interaction. These APIs provide the foundation, ensure that CSPs have the required data framework to bring relevant information to interactions with their customers, and provide better and differentiated experiences.

How do you use those APIs?

We added video calling to a CRM application, facilitating richer, more personal interactions with customers. The application invokes several TM Forum Open APIs, as well as public cloud services – our key building blocks. We used TMF629 Customer Management API to retrieve and modify customer data, TMF681 Communication Management API to share the video link with the customer using their preferred channel, and TMF621 Trouble Ticket API to create and update a trouble ticket to record details of the interaction. We used the APIs to call out to our video provider, Amazon Chime Video Conferencing, completing the workflow. And we coded and deployed in 30 minutes (demonstrated live in our DTWS workshop).

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

As a born-in-the-cloud BSS vendor, our focus is on enabling CSPs and other ISVs to take advantage of public cloud services to improve customer experiences and drive increased subscriber engagement. We decided to adopt and implement TM Forum Open APIs because CSPs largely drive the design process, and it benefits us to plug into a community of experts bringing decades of experience in how these APIs and the components that implement them will interact. Open APIs level the playing field and allow CSPs to pick best-in-breed components. We benefit from supporting our customers and empowering them to build their own solutions from the beginning. We don't have to guess their intent, or how they plan to use an API – they just use it. It's an easy way to get our customers to build something quickly with our tools, see if it’s working, and iterate again.

Where do you use the APIs?

Totogi API platform is 100% hosted and managed in the public cloud, and all of the certified APIs are deployed and readily available as soon as a customer signs up. All these APIs are pay-per-use, allowing CSPs to experiment and innovate freely with a simple and transparent cost model. All you need to do is bring your favorite development environment, and you can start coding – instantly.